Just like a tulip

Beautiful flowers, beautiful people

Tulip time, that wonderful season when colourful little beauties pop up and joyfully announce that spring is definitely here! When I see tulips, I think of our wonderful friend, Laura, who celebrates her birthday today. Laura loves tulips and has reminders of them in the garden, house and on the walls. She even has hand painted tulips on her birthday party invitation. And I guess it doesn’t hurt that her origins are Dutch.

Tulips seem to radiate a sense of joy, simply because they are alive. They live their lives to the fullest, show us their best, and share their gifts of beauty with us. A visit with Laura is like that. We feel her joy and thankfulness, experience her warmth and see her inner beauty. Her love radiates. Her friendship is a gift.

Today we are thankful for the tulips, and for our dear friend. And we know that our Creator is well pleased.

Photographing Tulips

I love to photograph tulips and am always drawn to their beauty. With many different tulip photos in my library, it’s hard not to repeat what I’ve done before. So this year, when I went to the tulip fields in Abbotsford, my challenge was to push my boundaries and find a different way to photograph them. A few of the ideas used here are:

Getting down low and shooting up. That is, lying in the muddy trench between the rows and pointing my camera up. In the image at the top of the page, I saw the sun positioned low in the sky and was able to create the star burst by positioning my camera so it just peeked around the flowers and used an aperture of f/14.
Using a fisheye lens. The same image described above, made with a fisheye lens, has the distinctive look of curving lines and and great depth of field. With its ultra wide field of view, I was able to capture more flowers and sky.
Double exposure. Two of the images above are in-camera double exposures. The first image was sharply focused on the flower and the second was very out of focus, creating a soft, impressionistic feel to the image.
Post processing. The last image is a composite of a sharp image on top of one made by intentional camera movement, and then combined in Photoshop. The second to the last image has a diffusion effect added to soften it. Finally, the image looking between the rows of flowers, has a watercolour effect added to it using SnapArt.

I hope you enjoy the images!

Beautiful flowers, beautiful people

Photographing Tulips

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